This dissertation explores how recent feminist authors uses their literature to create,
sustain, and expand the feminist movement through their creation of communities and
readerships. This project consists of four case studies, each of which examines how a
feminist author represents feminist identity, where she locates herself in relation to the
mainstream marketplace, which strategies she uses to circulate her representation, and
what forms of small and large feminist communities she is able to create. To develop this
analysis of feminist literary public culture, I focus on playwright Eve Ensler and her work
with the V-Day movement, novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and her expansion of the
chick lit genre, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes and her online small press, and the members of
spoken word group Sister Spit and their traveling road show. These individual case
studies, taken as a whole, speak to the ways that feminist authors are engaging
mainstream and feminist readers in ways that create and energize feminist communities.